


But Song Only Dropped

by SylvanWitch



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Apocafic, Established Relationship, M/M, brief spoiler for The Reichenbach Fall, everyone dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 16:47:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1476886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world was carefully orchestrated from a small country house in the heart of the South Downs in Sussex, England.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But Song Only Dropped

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from Isaac Rosenberg's WWI poem, "Returning, We Hear Larks." If you were to read that poem, I think you'd have some idea of the tone of this story. Please heed the warnings. It's the apocalypse. Really. Everyone dies.

The end of the world was carefully orchestrated from a small country house in the heart of the South Downs in Sussex, England.

Though it was indeed with the consummate skill of a true maestro that the cottage’s chief inhabitant organized the chaos of a world desperately spinning toward annihilation, the only actual music to come from the little farm and its lush environs was the plaintive, sometimes wild moan of a single, keening violin, and, somewhat less frequently, the absent-minded but robust humming of a man of middle age puttering about in his garden.

The actual symphony of destruction that Sherlock Holmes, our violinist, conducted was largely silent—or, at least, it certainly could not be heard from the privileged protection of his farm.

And aside from Dr. John Watson’s off-key humming, the only other sound of any note about the place was the steady rise and fall of contented bees going about their busy work in the kitchen garden and herb border and the orchard that stretched away, green and gold, toward a near horizon.

In fact, the only discordant chord in all the simple music might be struck by the name of this bucolic establishment:  _Ragnarok_ , painted in imperious black script across a white oak slab nailed firmly to the cross-bar of the farm’s impenetrable front gates.

If the hard-faced, cold-eyed men and women who stood beneath it appreciated its irony, they never said.

They never spoke at all, in fact, except when questioning the soldiers responsible for quarter-hourly perimeter reports or on the scheduled occasions when a closed black carriage would arrive at the gates and they would be required to seek identification from the occupant.

Of course, this was merely standard operating procedure; no one else ever came to Ragnarok except the masked man with the ruined voice who offered only words enough to verify his identity.

The driver of the carriage would dismount and be led into the guardhouse, replaced by armed soldiers who would resume the journey toward the house, pulling into a looping, white gravel drive in front of what had once been and was now again a carriage house and stables.

There, they were met by a stable boy, similarly armed, likewise stone-faced and uncommunicative, who would water the horses if it were to be a short stay or unharness and pasture them if it were to be of longer duration.

One guard would fall in before, the other behind the illustrious guest, and thus guarded, Mycroft Holmes would make his regal way into the eighteenth century white stone country house his brother and Dr. Watson called home.

His brother never greeted him, but Dr. Watson could be counted upon on most occasions to maintain some semblance of protocol.  As Mycroft was fond of noting in his arch voice, “Just because the world has gone to hell doesn’t mean that we must follow suit.”

The effect of such pronouncements was, admittedly, somewhat diminished by the fact that Mycroft could no longer speak above a harsh whisper.  The virus that had claimed so many millions had not left him untouched, though he’d survived, as his brother was fond of remarking, through sheer obstinacy and not a little bad grace.

Mycroft had done his best to adjust for his vocal limitations, however, and his eyebrow stood in for inflection more often than not.  The surgical mask, specially designed in a light, airy black fabric to compliment his clothes and maximize clarity, he refused to remove.  It hid the way the muscles of his face leapt and contorted despite his best efforts to prevent them. 

“He’s in the lab,” John Watson indicated when he opened the door to Mycroft.  “I wouldn’t disturb him if I were you.  He’s…” 

Here, Watson displayed a reticence formed by one part nature and two parts experience with the elder Holmes.  Despite all they’d survived together, John Watson still maintained a healthy suspicion of Mycroft Holmes’ motives.  He’d never quite forgotten, though he had forgiven, Mycroft’s having tried to sway Watson’s loyalty by monetary means on the fateful occasion of their first meeting.

“In a mood?” Mycroft supplied.  He hardly required Watson’s delicate intimations.  He’d grown up with the mercurial Sherlock, after all.

The thinning of Watson’s lips was his only response, but Mycroft read a wealth of meaning there.

John Watson was thinner overall than he had been on Mycroft’s last visit, and the lines about his eyes and mouth seemed deeper, though that had to be a mere trick of the light.  Over the years since the end had begun, Watson’s blonde hair had washed out to a wan, dishwater grey. The drab, cable-knit jumper he wore suppressed the magnetic blue of his eyes.  He looked tired and old, absent some of his usual energy.

It was a bad spell, then, Mycroft thought, but he wisely kept the observation to himself.

“Drink?” Watson asked, gesturing toward the sideboard where cut-crystal decanters gleamed in the early afternoon light.

“Please.”

Once ensconced in comfortable chairs to either side of the fire, Mycroft allowed himself a further analysis of Watson’s features.

The scar on his throat had whitened with age, and it now appeared as though a slim, pale worm slumbered just beneath the thin skin, parallel to the blue vein that throbbed visibly in slow time to Watson’s heartbeat.

The wound that had nearly killed him had left other, less apparent marks on the good doctor as well, and it was only through long years of careful cataloguing that Mycroft had come to understand just what the cost of love had been for this man.

The costs Mycroft himself had paid weren’t worth considering, not when there was still work to be done.

For his part, Watson was content to be looked at, used to the scrutiny of sharp, pale eyes and the deliberate suggestion of a curled lip or fixed brow.  Of course, he’d broken Sherlock of most of those behaviors, but he’d been object of them for long enough to have learned to settle under such examination rather than bridle at it.

“Has he been working on the latest problem?”

They spoke in euphemisms these days.  There was no other language allowed in the house, in fact.  They said “issue” when they meant disaster, “trouble” when they meant catastrophe.

“Problem” was reserved for an utterly immovable and particularly troubling apocalyptic certainty.

In this case, Sherlock Holmes was meant to be investigating a secondary remote delivery system for an anti-viral agent that could be inhaled readily and that would not dissipate immediately upon dispersal.

Watson nodded, looking not at Mycroft but into the fire.  A vein beneath his eye twitched, but Mycroft had enough tact to ignore it.  He’d learned over the years when John Watson was not to be pushed.

Probably, he was thinking of Molly Hooper, who’d sacrificed her life to design the initial delivery system, which had offered such promise when it had first been tried on the infected populace of Southbank and Southwark.

That had been before the whole of London had been quarantined, before the bread lines and hunger riots.  Before snipers had picked off desperate women who’d been trying to throw their squalling infants over the newly built wall.

Before Greg had—

“I take it that he has had no success?”

In fact, John Watson had not been thinking of their fallen friends.  He was drawn from a much more immediate and immensely more pleasant memory—of Sherlock’s deft hands bringing him to pleasure only that morning—by Mycroft’s question but was spared from manufacturing an answer by the subject of the query himself.

“Failure, as I’m sure you know, brother, is a success in itself, insofar as it narrows the window of inquiry.”

“That’s a no, then,” Mycroft answered, brow quirked in an especially pointed sneer.

Rather than answer, Sherlock entered the room and perched stiffly on the sofa that sat behind and to one side of the fireplace chairs and in such a way that Mycroft was forced to turn his head uncomfortably in order to taken in a full view of his brother’s figure.

Naturally, John could see Sherlock without straining.

What he saw only increased the tempo of the twitching below his eye.

Sherlock had never been what one might call robust, but in the last few months, since the rate of infection had increased by exponential degrees according to the data Mycroft supplied, Watson’s lover had grown positively cadaverous.  There was an unhealthy grey tinge underlying his already marked pallor, and his brilliant eyes were offset by bruised purple rings beneath them.  There was an almost indiscernible tremor in his hands, and even his ordinarily untamable hair lay limp and listless against his forehead.

“Did you bring the samples?”

Mycroft nodded at a small biohazard case that had been left discreetly just inside and to one side of the sitting room door.

“And the flour?”

This, Mycroft produced from the grip at his feet, handing the powdery linen sack to John, who gave it a fond, sad look before setting it beside a decade-old medical journal on his side table.

Mycroft knew that if he opened said journal to the page that had been marked with an equally elderly receipt from the Chinese takeaway at the corner of Baker and Dorset Streets, he’d find the article that had eventually made Sherlock Holmes a household name for entirely different reasons than those that had initially earned him a reputation.

That is, when there had been households and electricity and media of any kind.

The article, which Watson had been reading on and off between dozing fits before their drafty fireplace on Baker Street, had identified a rare strain of an equally rare filovirus that had decimated the population of a small village in the Central African Republic.

It had killed ninety-eight percent of the villagers, three nurses from the CAR, and one WHO doctor.

The second World Health Organization doctor had survived the virus, and though her voice had been ruined and her muscles plagued with Parkinson-like tremors for the rest of her life, her intellect and experience had remained intact, and she’d brought her knowledge back to the world.

The world had largely ignored her.

Watson, who’d had a passing interest in epidemiology and a flatmate with a voracious appetite for the outré, had shared the article’s contents over breakfast the next day.

That had been July 2014.

Distracted as he’d been by a case, Sherlock had set aside the worm of suggestion the article had bored into the woodwork of his mind palace and went about solving the series of grisly murders they’d been investigating.

Had it not been for John’s near-fatal encounter with the killer, when his jugular had been nicked and his warm blood had seeped through Holmes’ desperate, shaking fingers, Holmes may never have had occasion to dig the suggestion out and examine it more closely.

While John lingered in a coma, the damage to his brain from blood loss infuriatingly unclear to the doctors of St. Bart’s, Sherlock’s clockwork brain had sprung apart.  Unable to think beyond the next beep of the heart monitor, breath synchronized with the agonizing regularity of the respirator keeping John alive, Sherlock had been paralyzed by a terror that had been as unlooked for as it had proven ultimately natural.

He’d discovered in an instant both that he loved John Watson with an annihilating totality and that he could not function until John recovered.

It had been Mycroft who had brought the medical journal, abandoned as it had been on the very side table that held it still, to his brother.  He’d given it to Sherlock with little hope that his brother would take his suggestion to read aloud to Watson, but Sherlock had at that point been desperate to find some artificial mooring upon which to fix his mind, and he’d begun the task without argument.

Even so, he might never have routed out the parasitic little thought about the filo virus if it hadn’t been for John having at last regained consciousness.

After the choked, private confessions that John had only half-remembered later

(and such forgetting had proven a total joy, because it meant that Sherlock could repeat the words into his sweat-damp skin, murmur them over the points of pleasure on his prone and trembling body, brand them forever in his brain with the urgent gentleness of their first consummation)

—after such confessions and the ensuing moments of enrapt silence, after hands held and breath loosed and promises asked for and answered in kind, Sherlock had leapt somewhat unsteadily from the visitor’s chair, seized the journal, and called out, “I’ll be in the lab,” as he’d rushed past his disgruntled brother and the happily surprised Lestrade, who’d come to pay John his second visit of that week.

That had been early September 2014.

In those days, they’d taken for granted Mrs. Hudson’s scones, fresh bread for toast, a bowl of cereal, a plate of pasta.

They’d consumed Chinese noodles and oatcakes and meat pasties, tarts and biscuits and muffins.

None of them, with the exception of Sherlock, had imagined that someday a one-kilo bag of whole grain flour would be worth more than the same weight in heroin.

“The honey’s on the table next to the umbrella stand,” John said, and Mycroft nodded.

“It’s a particularly excellent batch,” Sherlock offered, something of ease entering his voice and his posture.  He had reason to be proud of his bees.

“You’ve always had the gift,” Mycroft conceded.

It was as close to a passionate declaration of brotherly love as the two were likely to come, even despite the horrors they’d witnessed together, the sacrifices they’d each had to make.

John had once asked Sherlock about the continued tension between the brothers, who’d otherwise seemed to have at last come to an abiding détente.  “It’s how I know I’m still myself,” Sherlock had explained to John while they lay side by side, still damp from the sweat of lovemaking, hands tangled together, sheets wrapped around their legs.

John understood something of that.  He had to struggle to remember a time when he hadn’t determined the course of his day based on the direction Sherlock was facing.

Mycroft, too, seemed to relax a little in his chair, and the three men sat in companionable quiet for a time before Sherlock stood up and turned toward the door.

“You’ll stay for dinner?”

“Of course.”

“Seven, then,” he added, more for John’s benefit than for his brother’s.  Long gone were the days when John begrudged Sherlock any time he was forced to spend with Mycroft.  The two men who loved Sherlock most in the world had called a truce almost a decade ago.

“Would you like to take a walk?” John asked, knowing how Mycroft appreciated the opportunity to take in the air.

“I think I should very much enjoy that.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then.”  John knew, as well, that Mycroft preferred solitary perambulations.

“Join me?”

Mycroft’s uncharacteristic hesitancy set off an alarm for John, and he turned his head to take in the elder Holmes’ face, what he could see of it behind the vanity mask.

His eyes were solemn, but then, they usually were, his forehead creased, his hair greyer yet than when last Mycroft had visited the farm.

Something else lurked in the man’s steady gaze, though, an abiding sadness that he usually kept well-hidden.

“Ah,” said John aloud, surprised into an exclamation he hadn’t intended.  How he could have forgotten the date, he didn’t know, except perhaps that he had had more immediate sorrows on his mind.  Tomorrow was the anniversary of Greg Lestrade’s death.

“Indeed” was the sardonic reply.

So they took a walk together through the bee-loud glade, down into orchards where the trees were heavy with fruit.  The grass was long, but neither minded, the gentle susurration somehow soothing.  At the far end of the orchard was a dark pine wood, and they walked on, footfalls silent on the fragrant needles, sky serrated by the swaying canopy that cast its cool shadows over their steps.

“Is this far enough, then?” John asked.  Mycroft had paused in a place where some long ago arborgeddon had cleared a space of trees, sunlight like an inverted spire piercing the loam where they stood.

Mycroft turned a smile upon him then, the sort that acknowledged being caught out, but he asked nonetheless, “Far enough for what?”

“For you to tell me whatever it is that you don’t want me to share with Sherlock.”

Though he’d long ago learned never to underestimate the estimable doctor, Mycroft still admired the ways in which John Watson could surprise him.

Greg had had that quality, too.

“It isn’t going to work,” he said then, without preamble.

“I know.  I know that,” John answered, voice solemn and steadfast.  They were saying aloud at last something neither had ever acknowledged to anyone before.

To John, it felt illicit, and not in a thrilling way, to be murmuring to one another beneath the soughing pines.  This sort of thing, what they were talking about—it should be shouted from the rooftops.  It should be heard by every sleeping child, even.  No one should be immune to the truth as they understood it.

“We have to keep him safe from knowing.”

Still more wrong, this talk of protecting Sherlock from knowledge. 

“On some level he already understands.”

“Yes,” Mycroft agreed.  “But he’ll never give up the quest.  And it will kill him.”  He enunciated each of the last three words.

“No it won’t.”  To his credit, John’s voice didn’t quaver, even though they were talking about the end of the actual world.  “It won’t kill him because I won’t let it.”  His last four words were enunciated just as clearly as Mycroft’s terminal three had been.

And then they seemed to hear themselves, hear the ridiculous irony of their declarations.

Of course it would kill Sherlock.  Everyone was going to die.  It was the end of the bloody world.

Their laughter rang crows from the trees overhead, their raucous black cackles circling the space of clear sky overhead, blotting out the sun.

It seemed a fitting note on which to end their talk and return to the farm, where they would have dinner and pretend that they didn’t believe in harbingers.

  
*****

  
“It isn’t going to work,” Sherlock said.  Neither John nor Mycroft did him the disservice of attempting to argue.

Sherlock had worked slavishly over the new blood samples Mycroft had delivered three months before; he’d strained his mind and his body to their utmost limits, as was his wont.

And he’d found a means of delivering an airborne anti-virus to large populations; it had had the effect of killing 38% of the test subjects outright, but that was a statistic what was left of the government could live with.  Well, 62% of them, at least.

It wasn’t the epidemic about which Sherlock was speaking.

Only three days earlier, John had found him prostrate on the floor of his laboratory, a watery stream of pinkish blood purling from his nose, his eyes rolled back in his head, his breath shallow and irregular.  When he’d regained consciousness, Sherlock had said, “It’s no use.  Number 57,” and then succumbed to exhaustion once more.

Since then, Sherlock hadn’t been allowed to work, and by the very fact that he had failed to protest John’s treatment, he’d indicated more clearly than his words were doing now that they were beyond the point of hope.

He looked more than wrung out, John reflected.  He looked defeated, his posture and expression, even the way he took in and then surrendered his breath an indication of his entire relinquishment of hope.

Of course, Sherlock had predicted it would turn out this way.

By October 2014, Sherlock, with Molly Hooper’s help, had constructed a stochastic model to predict real-time spread of the filo virus under a series of conditions and allowing for certain variables provided by Sherlock.

By November 2014, he’d gathered enough disparate threads of a vast, global terror web that he’d felt it was necessary to involve Mycroft.

By December, he’d stood before the UK’s greatest minds (a term he used only loosely) and laid out a logical progression of diabolical plans so Byzantine in their complexity and so Machiavellian in their intent that his audience had either laughed with scorn or sat in confused silence when he’d finished.

It had been a narrow thing keeping Mycroft’s job.

But Mycroft had seen the truth in his little brother’s prognostications and had stood beside him while he’d been derided out of government offices, debunked by information analysts, and disregarded by every political pundit, media maven, and bombastic blogger to whom he’d eventually, in desperation, appealed.

Like a latter-day Cassandra, Sherlock Holmes had been ignored until it was largely far too late for the shining city.

The day the economy had crashed, John had come home to their now closely guarded flat to find his lover curled, knees-to-chin, in John’s usual chair, arms wrapped around his shins and a single silver track sliding down his cheek.

He’d never seen Sherlock cry.

(John did not count the one occasion, of which they rarely spoke—those hadn’t been genuine tears, not really, though Sherlock, had you asked him, might have said there was real sorrow in them, for having to leave behind London and John.  In those days, the city had come first, his only true love.  How things changed.)

John had gone to him, knelt at his feet, put his hands over Sherlock’s, and said, “What is it, love?”

“Love” was an endearment no more natural than “mate” or “chap” for them, but the slip didn’t elicit so much as a twitch of condescension from the other.

“Is it Mycroft?”  

This, at least, got a reaction, a wry curl of one corner of Sherlock’s wet lips.

“Mrs. Hudson?”

This time a huff.

John took a breath, prepared to go through the whole catalogue of their nearer and dearer acquaintances—though it wouldn’t take all that long, in truth—when Sherlock said, “You.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re going to die.”

“What, _now_?”  John had played for time, both mystified and strangely touched by Sherlock’s anguish.  But Sherlock wouldn’t be humored.

“It’s not funny, John.  You’re going to die, and then I’ll be alone again, and I don’t think—.”

Here he had marshalled his emotions with a visible effort, and John would have given almost anything in the world to follow Sherlock into the winding corridors of his mind until he’d cornered the end of that sentence.

As it was, Sherlock shrugged, released the death-grip on his legs, effectively pushing John off-balance and onto his arse on the floor.

With an “Oof!” and then a “Hey!” he had let himself be manhandled up and into the bedroom, where Sherlock had taken his usual steps of shutting up both John’s further questions and his own racing brain.

Later, John had come to understand that this had been the moment when Sherlock accepted that the end of the world meant the end of their love, which was still so new and precious a thing that neither of them had even labeled it yet nor shared it with the world except accidentally.

Mycroft had had an inkling, of course.  (John had suspicions in his darker moments that Mycroft also had footage.)  And Molly had guessed with the unerring instinct she had for all things related to Sherlock’s purloined heart.

Mrs. Hudson couldn’t have missed the (rather loud) signs unless she’d gone deaf.

But otherwise, they had still been new, then, to the awful and awesome truth of their mutual love.

As he had when John had been near death, Sherlock had that day reiterated his feelings by touch, as if he could communicate his too-full heart by murmuring it against the skin of John’s throat, at the join of his thigh, behind his sac, into the delicate indentation of his ankle.  John had been eaten alive, he’d felt, swallowed up in Sherlock’s fervor, promised to an infinitude of love that defied every equation even Sherlock could devise.

It hadn’t been enough, but Sherlock hadn’t known it at the time, and John had been too merciful to speak of it.

He’d known even then that this day would come, the day when the absolute mathematics of Sherlock’s original models would prove beyond the doubt of even the least reasonable mind that the end was, as it were, nigh.

“Number 57” referred to a variable in Sherlock’s initial apocalypse model that was associated with the Boko Haram, Islamist extremists in central Africa who had gone largely unnoticed by world governments too easily distracted by the mania of Kim Jun Un and the bare-chested posturing of Russia’s leader.  Few had cared about six dozen dead college students in Nigeria or forty-two slaughtered policemen in Cameroon.

Those places were far away, their inhabitants as under-developed as their infrastructures.

When Sherlock had insisted that there was a connection between the Boko Haram, the communal violence in the CAR, and the outbreak of a mysterious filo virus, no one had been in the least bit interested.

The world may very well have remained completely oblivious to the threat from that district if it hadn’t been for the liquidation of an entire rebel army unit in Syria, the disappearance of two repurposed Russian military cargo planes from Afghanistan, and the conveniently timed breakdown of electronic communications across the top half of the African continent.

When order had been restored—for a given value of order—it was discovered that the dead Syrian rebels had uncovered a cache of chemical weapons (now missing), the stolen planes had been used by a German oil company to transport volatile gases in canisters, and no one in the CAR could explain how it came to be that an entire airfield near Bambari had been seized by jihadists.

Even so, the world may have been saved from certain destruction.  Sherlock had, after all, eventually discovered a cure for the virus the Boko Haram had engineered with al-Queda funds, transported with Russian trucks, and delivered with Syrian warheads.

It had cost countless lives—

[and John could hear Sherlock saying, “Some lives count more than others,” as they stood beside the tasteful urn holding the last remains of Molly Hooper]

and untold suffering

[John remembered arriving at the police lines, seeing Mycroft standing like a statue of Sorrow, rain glistening on his bare head, blood soaking his suit coat, the shirt beneath it, coating his hands, spattered on his eyelashes and at the corner of his mouth, and Greg’s lifeless body arranged precisely parallel to the curb where he’d fallen]

but Sherlock had eventually prevailed over the virus.

Unfortunately, the virus wasn’t the only thing the Boko Haram had loosed.

“How long do we have?” Mycroft asked his brother as the late afternoon light drew deeper shadows across the dusty carpet of the farm’s comfortable sitting room.

Sherlock’s answer was immediate:  “Given current meteorological conditions and allowing for a .002% margin of error, the cloud should arrive over Sussex in forty-three days.”

There, then.  More precise than an oncologist’s prognosis, more final than a bullet to the brain:  All the time left in which they had to love.

“Sit,” John said gently, and Sherlock folded himself into his chair by the fire.  He took in the tremor in Sherlock’s hands, the waxen greyness of his cheeks, uncharacteristically unshaven, and handed him a cup of tea.

Mycroft shifted minutely on the sofa, a deliberate movement to indicate his intentions.

“Stay,” Sherlock said quietly, not looking away from the fire, which was painting deceptively warm, ruddy color onto Sherlock’s face. 

“If I must,” Mycroft huffed, but his voice had its own warmth.

Later, as a fat half-moon rose over the orchard, John and Sherlock walked slowly between the trellised peas and the first row of broad-leafed squash plants growing lush from their breast-shaped mounds.

The last skylark was ushering out the day with its liquid song.  A toad hopped disconsolately out of their way, thwarted back legs scrambling for purchase.

“I love you,” Sherlock said, and John felt his throat close in reaction and a sudden heart-stuttering wash of icy fear pooling in his belly.

He’d heard Sherlock say that they had forty-three days, had understood and accepted the words, but nothing had quite penetrated his wall of calm acceptance until Sherlock spoke the words aloud that he had only ever before whispered against the secret places of John’s body.

John turned to look at Sherlock, gazing upon that beloved profile, ethereal in the light of the moon, and saw on his face the truth of his words.  Stopping Sherlock with a hand on his arm, John stepped in front of him, cupped Sherlock’s face in his hands, feeling the sharpness of his cheekbones against his palm and shooing away the ghost of Irene Adler, who sometimes rose to haunt them.

Here, though, and now, John knew with absolute certainty that Sherlock was his and his alone, and even as he felt the devastation of having at last a finite limit on the number of days and ways in which he could return that love, he rejoiced in being able to lean against his lover’s steady length and lay open that love with a kiss.

When he pulled away from the kiss, he was breathless and over-warm, aware of the cool night air on his blazing cheeks and the puff of damp heat against his kiss-roughened lips as Sherlock panted.

Had it not been for the dew in the grass, John’s shoulder, Sherlock’s knees, they might have come undone in the garden like some biblical revision.  As it was, Sherlock took John’s hand in his and led him with graceful haste to their room.

Their bed was awash in moonlight, the glow of it gilding the warm wooden floor, too, and John shivered as he slipped out of his jumper, toed off his shoes and socks, dropped his trousers and pants, shivered again when Sherlock stretched himself out on the cool white duvet, alabaster skin turned to blue marble.

He almost thought his lover would be cold to the touch, but when he placed his hand flat against the hollow of Sherlock’s stomach, he felt the heat of his need, and he didn’t hesitate to follow the soft, pale trail of hair to the root of him.

Their loving that night was slow and hurried by turns, one moment frantic, Sherlock urging John closer, deeper, faster, the next stilling beneath John and breathing his name as though he’d just woken from a nightmare to find the world still whole and real.

When they were sated, sweat mingled, the brilliant air around them heavy with the evidence of their mutual pleasure, John stared up at the ceiling, feeling Sherlock beside him from the knob of his anklebone to the ball of his shoulder, and sensed for just a moment the ponderous swing of the earth as it rode its nightly course.

And then he thought of it as if from far above, its blue and white and green and gold, thought of it turning onward and onward, moonset and sunrise, spring and autumn, thaw and freeze, and wondered how it had ever been that life was taken for granted.

He wished for a long-held breath that they could have left something here to say, “We never gave up.  We mattered.  Don’t judge us for our awful fall but for the heights we strained to reach before the plunge.”

And then Sherlock brushed his pinky finger along John’s own, curled it about and held fast, like a pledge between children, and John let his eyes close on the second-to-last half-moon he’d ever see.

 

*****

 

The last day of their lives dawned grey and dreary, the final fruit they might have eaten rotting in the orchard, the peas they couldn’t consume curling their brown, desiccated fingers against the trellis, the squash plants yellow and white with plant mold.

John woke to find their bed empty, shrugged into his robe, and padded out into the garden, knowing he’d find Sherlock beside his silent hives.  The bees had already succumbed to environmental changes, their tiny, bright bodies like fading suns littered around the white and pink and pale blue boxes.

“I think we should be naked,” Sherlock said without preamble, but these days, John didn’t need annotations.

“Alright.”

Neither of them spoke about how there’d be no one left to find their bodies, and despite a few heated exchanges between the brothers regarding the possibility of aliens discovering Earth epochs into the future, neither John nor Sherlock pretended there’d be any being at all left to look upon their mingled remains.

They’d already decided when they’d take the pills; Sherlock’s predictions had proved entirely accurate, so it was to be this afternoon, a few hours before the toxic cloud arrived to choke the life from their lungs.  They’d already be gone by then, immune to the searing gas, the vomiting, the blinding, acidic tears.

They knew where they’d take the pills, too:  In their bedroom, under the warm, down duvet, lying side by side, maybe hands joined, maybe ankles linked one over the other.

Mycroft would be in the room down the hall and would take his pill first. 

They’d have a few minutes of time alone after that—truly alone; the staff had been dismissed a week before, sent off to seek what solace they might find in the blighted world before taking their own little yellow pills and shuffling off their mortal coils.

In his more morbid moments, John imagined the Downs blanketed in rotting bodies, not even the neat cyclic promise of carrion birds to clean up the mess.

He tried not to be morbid, though.  There was no use in dwelling.  They were all going to die.

John put a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder and stretched up to kiss him beneath his ear.  Sherlock turned, eyes bright and curious, absent of the exhaustion that had dogged him in the weeks since he’d pronounced their doom.  He’d agreed to cease his work a week before the end, at Day 36, and the rest had done him a world of good.

No one missed the irony.

Of course, Sherlock had kept working until the thirty-sixth day—at a way to dissipate the oncoming cloud, on probability models for people in other nations who’d perhaps found shelter and the lowest genetic diversity threshold possible to maintain species viability.

He’d considered breathing apparatuses and bunkers and a host of other impossible inventions.  None of the resources they had left in the UK would allow for the survival of even a few of them. 

So many of the government’s long-term emergency plans had made foolish assumptions:  that there’d be enough fossil fuels to power the generators that turned the ventilation fans to scrub the air in the bunkers, to run the computers that regulated temperature and air flow, to operate the water and sewage systems, to power the lights and furnaces.

The war that the United States had begun in central Africa after the Boko Haram had unleashed the filo virus had predictably spread to the Middle East and thereby effectively ended the UK’s access to steady fossil fuel supplies.  None of her allies were willing to part with even a small portion of their own dwindling store, and even drastic rationing had not prevented the inevitable.

They’d been without gasoline or diesel for almost three years, and though many had adapted admirably, none had come up with a solution for the problem of the air itself growing poisonous and corrosive.

Perhaps some could have survived long enough for the cloud to dissipate (two years, three months, sixteen days, Sherlock had said one night, allowing for variables in wind speed, unpredictable volcanic eruptions, and the average temperature of the Pacific Ocean) in submerged submarines in the Arctic Circle, if only the Third World War hadn’t decimated Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.  (Devenport and Clyde were dismal craters now.) 

Mycroft had shared a wild rumor he’d heard about a space-ark carrying the best minds and most fertile bodies into indefinite orbit around the Moon, a fallacious balloon he’d been gleeful to pop.  (“Ignorance may be blissful, but it’s also annoying,” he’d said at the time.)

And they’d talked of moving to the Arctic themselves, but it had taken Sherlock only four hours of half-hearted—but nonetheless meticulously proofed—modeling to determine the likelihood of their survival there.  (“Zero,” he’d said with a smirk.  He’d made it clear already that he wasn’t a fan of the “country,” as he called their snug estate.  One could imagine how he’d feel about a snowy wasteland.)

No, they were going to spend the last hours of their lives here, where they’d made a comfortable home for themselves after Baker Street had been destroyed, and they were going to die like Mrs. Hudson had, quietly and with no fuss. 

Neither virus nor war nor famine had claimed their indomitable landlady.  She’d succumbed to old age sitting in her favorite chair reading a two-year-old gossip rag and sipping her best tea.  No one could say she didn’t know when and how to make a gracious exit.

They could ask for no less of themselves.

“Would you like some tea and toast?” John asked, letting his hand drift from Sherlock’s shoulder.

“Have we any of the duck eggs left?”

“A few.”

“Omelette?”

“We have the mushrooms that Mycroft collected.”

“I suppose it’s safe to assume they aren’t poisonous.”

They laughed, the sort of hollow, short sound they’d come to associate with gallows humor, of which there was an abundance at Ragnarok.

Mycroft joined them in the kitchen to critique John’s method of cracking the big, thick-shelled brown eggs, but as he took care that the toast didn’t burn and surprised them with a jar of preserves they thought they’d long since run out of, neither of them complained too much.

At midday, as a weak sun broke through the clouds and began the long work of burning away the greyness, they let the livestock out of their pens and stalls. Though none of the three men were particularly sentimental about the animals that had provided them with reliable sustenance for so many years, neither were they especially cruel.

“It seems the right thing to do,” Mycroft offered in his harsh whisper that always these days seemed to have something of the grave about it.

“And after all, they won’t be hit by cars or make a nuisance at the neighbors’ place,” John observed.  Leaving aside that the next nearest farm was a moldering ruin sloughing shingles like molted skin, there were no other people left within fifteen miles at least, according to Mycroft.

When John and Sherlock took a walk at around half past two, they were startled by a goat charging from the tall grass in the orchard, which they’d left uncut.  It butted John, who lost his balance and fell into the still wet grass.  Sherlock laughed, a sharp sound that rang across the meadow, startling swallows out of their pole house at the center of the great space.

From his sprawl on the damp ground, John watched the birds make a canvas of the sky, painting their iridescence against the dull blue and chattering as they always did when they were disturbed.  They swooped and dove, wove trails of light behind them as they mingled, and then at last perched once more in rows, one of them now and again unsettling the stillness with a ruffle of wing feathers.

 He found himself suddenly breathless at the realization that he’d never again watch swallows in flight. 

John startled when Sherlock crouched beside him, touched his face, his fingers coming away wet with tears John hadn’t meant to shed.

“Let’s go in,” Sherlock suggested, standing up and offering John a hand.

He took it, grateful for the warmth and strength yet in it, and didn’t let go until they came to the kitchen door, where Mycroft waited, eyes grim.

“You have news,” Sherlock stated, pausing on the threshold, John behind him, looking into their yellow and white kitchen with its butcher block table and the red tiled floor.  Sunlight was sifting through the lace eyelets of the curtains, speckling the cutting board, the last loaf of bread, the knife they used for cheese.

“I’ve seen it,” Mycroft said, reaching a steady hand up to unfasten his mask.  He dropped it with deliberation into the bin beside the door.  The muscles of his face twitched as though he was trying to hold back sobs, but John knew it was only physiological and involuntary.

There was a widow’s walk at the south end of the house; when they’d first arrived, John had used it for stargazing, setting up a telescope there and learning the stars.  Sherlock in those days had been busy round the clock, barely sleeping or eating, and John had refused to become a housewife, puttering around until it was time to coax his husband down for supper.

So he’d spent his evening hours alone in the walk, until eventually Sherlock had come looking for him to share a breakthrough or mutter out his frustrations and been captivated by the sight of the night sky as seen through John’s eyes.

For a moment, all Sherlock could think of in response to Mycroft’s terse declaration was his irritation at the image of Mycroft staring vulture-like out across their green farm from the place he and John had always used to escape the earth’s grip.

Then, dismissing it as ridiculous to indulge in any of the old frustrations he’d shared for his whole life with a brother he was about to usher into eternal darkness, Sherlock smiled and said, “We have time for a cup of tea, I’d imagine,” and walked into the kitchen.

There was already a plate of bread and one of cheese, thin apple slices and the last of the year’s peaches on the table.  There was clotted cream and honey, the best of his last batch, a mellow rich gold in the afternoon sun.

Mycroft had set out the best china cups, the ones that had belonged to their mother.  He’d folded the serviettes into doves.

Sherlock smirked at the domestic display, but when Mycroft asked him to be mother, he found himself suddenly short of breath.  Swallowing around something warm and choking, Sherlock nodded and poured, wrestling back a tremor in his hands with sheer force of will.

He would not bring to this table anything maudlin.  There was no cause for tears here.  They were together and warm, well-fed and whole, able to breathe and see and understand for this last little while.

They lingered over the meal and talked solely of the past:  of people they had known, cases they had investigated, adventures and perils and hair’s-breadth escapes.  Mycroft told an uproarious story about a junior MI-6 agent and a herd of Castilian goats.  

Eventually, conversation turned, naturally and without strain, to Molly and Greg and Mrs. Hudson, touching lightly, leaving them only to circle back around, coming closer on each revolution to speaking with a frankness they’d never have dared should they have expected to live to be reminded of the words.

“So,” John worked up to asking, “Did you and Greg ever…?”  He trailed off with a little smile that Sherlock had always found one part attractive and two parts infuriating.  It suggested that John was innocent only insofar as he intended no offense, and Sherlock had witnessed that smirk get John out of not a few situations in which he’d really deserved to be punched.

“We hadn’t the chance to really…connect…in that way,” Mycroft admitted at last, and if he were wincing with regret, it was hard to tell for the way the muscles of his face did a perpetual tarantella.  “I waited too long,” he confessed at last, betraying a nervousness in the way he kept rearranging his butter knife in relation to his bread plate.

“I’m sorry,” John answered, and Sherlock was once again struck by his lover’s sincerity, by the depths of feeling he could plumb even now, when the world was quite literally ending.  All the death hadn’t made John callous or jaded, only forced him to mine deeper in his spirit to find the strength of will required to offer compassion and understanding in a place and time so utterly devoid of both.

Sherlock felt a quickening of his pulse as he noticed the way shadows had crept into their sunny kitchen, and just as he took a breath to speak, Mycroft said, “I think I’ll go up now.”

They all rose then, stepping back from the table, making a triangle of awkwardness and uncertainty.  Sherlock found in it something absurd; surely they could unbend enough for affection at such a time.  With an indistinct noise of impatience, Sherlock approached Mycroft with his arms open and welcomed his brother into them for the first time in years and the last time forever.

“Perhaps we’ve been wrong all along,” Mycroft whispered into Sherlock’s neck, his breath or his words raising a shiver in Sherlock. 

“Don’t tell me you’ve at last gone senile,” Sherlock answered, tightening his embrace as prelude to letting Mycroft go.  “There’s absolutely no evidence of an afterlife.”

“I thought I’d try on the sentiment,” Mycroft explained, turning to John and offering him his hand. 

John took the hand and pulled Mycroft into one of those manly half-hugs, muttering something about an honor and a true pleasure and a good man and a lot of rot Sherlock was quite sure they’d all be glad to delete once the pills took hold.

“You’ve little more than an hour,” Mycroft said by way of parting, turning to leave the kitchen and mount the stairs to the second floor, where he’d already arranged his room for his final rest.

The silence in the kitchen took on the quality of oppression, like the waiting room of an A&E after the wreck victims have been wheeled, limp-limbed and bloody, through to surgery.

“Let’s go upstairs?” John suggested, and Sherlock noted his hesitancy and the slight tic at the corner of his left eye, which indicated emotional strain.

Sherlock took John’s hand and turned toward the door, leading him through the hall and into the foyer and then up the stairs to the second floor.  They were on the wing opposite Mycroft’s, but Sherlock couldn’t help but pause at the top of the stairs anyway, knowing he was unlikely to hear his brother stirring but wishing for a moment against his logical nature that Mycroft would somehow make a sound that indicated his state.

There was music, faint but audible, one of Sherlock’s original compositions; he hadn’t known Mycroft even had a copy.

It was the piece Sherlock had written for the last Christmas they’d had Mrs. Hudson with them.  She’d always loved the lighter, playful pieces, and in the motif he could hear her laughter as he’d bowed vigorously through the allegro.

Sherlock resisted the urge to spy on his brother, to see if he wore a smile or if he were lonely or afraid.  They’d agreed that there would be no long farewells, that they would say goodbye in the fashion to which the Holmeses had grown accustomed.

A gentle tug on his hand pulled Sherlock’s focus back to John, who was giving him a questioning look.

He nodded once, decisively, and turned his back to his brother’s wing, continuing their measured journey to the bedroom he and John shared.

The door was open to the last long rays of the afternoon sun painting pools of lighter blue against the simple woven rug that covered the center of the floor.  The honey oak, mellowed with long wear, gleamed dully in the shrinking sunlight and made his chest ache.

He wasn’t sentimental about things; he could take or leave the rug, the room, even the plush white duvet upon which he’d spread John out and made him squirm, made him break Sherlock’s name into panting syllables, made him clutch at Sherlock’s hair and urge him to move or stay just there, just so, never to stop, never to plummet over the edge, never to swim back up out of the white-noise depths and into a world hazy with pleasure and a surety that he was loved.

It wasn’t things at all that he was desperate to hold.  It wasn’t even the indifferent minutes sliding carelessly away from them as Sherlock paused just inside the door, hand in hand with John, whom he loved more than breathing, as would soon be amply proven.

“I know,” John said, his voice husky with unshed tears.  “I know.”

Sherlock couldn’t look at him.  It was intolerable that he should be wasting these precious seconds.  But the rug and the floor and the bed and the sunlight…

“Sherlock,” John said, letting go of his hand.  “Come to bed.”

Sherlock turned to see John pulling his jumper over his head, undoing the buttons of his shirt, nothing teasing but no haste in the motions, either, just the simple, ordinary movements John had made a thousand times before.

Sherlock followed him item for item until they were naked, and he moved forward to bracket the balls of John’s shoulders in his hands and move him until he was standing in the middle of the rug with the pale gold sunlight brushing loving strokes over John’s hair.

Sherlock followed the light with his hand, cupped John’s chin, leaned forward to breathe a kiss against his lips.

John swallowed audibly, a painful sound, and Sherlock broke abruptly from the embrace to stalk to the bed and stretch out, leaning up on one elbow to watch John walk across their room to him.

It was like any other time and none, as mundane as it could ever be to once more be gifted with John’s naked body but also extraordinary, as if they were the first two men to ever stand open in the fleeing light of a dying day and share touch and breath and life.

John hesitated at the side of the bed, eyes tracing the lines of Sherlock’s body so avidly that he could almost feel them as a caress, and he shivered, lifted a hand, palm up, curling his fingers in invitation.

Sherlock watched John climb onto the bed, watched him mirror Sherlock in posture.  They settled their hands in at the curve of one another’s waist, and Sherlock noted how hot John’s hand felt, observed the faintest tremor telegraphed against his skin, and took in a steady breath before saying, “You’ve gained a few pounds.”

John’s face crinkled into an expression of disbelief, followed quickly by the more familiar outrage, and then he huffed in laughter, the sort of sound he always offered when he wasn’t sure whether to call Sherlock a name or refuse to speak at all.

Sherlock let his hand slide up the curve, trace John’s hip, brush the coarse hair on his thigh, then moved back upward, numbering his ribs, avoiding the ticklish spot that always made John writhe with silent, breathless laughter.

John’s hand moved likewise, and they went on like that, like an erotic game of monkey see, monkey do, until they were breathing a little faster and Sherlock could feel himself growing hard.  A glance at John told him the effect was mutual.

It was the most natural thing for John to hook a leg over Sherlock’s, baring himself, and for Sherlock to reach back to the bedside table and retrieve the scented oil they preferred for preparation.

John choked out, “God, Sherlock,” as Sherlock moved his fingers inside of him, and bit him on the collarbone when Sherlock hitched John’s leg higher against his hip and slid home.

They rocked in shallow thrusts, as if there were all the time in the world, as if on John’s bedside table there weren’t two little yellow pills, engineered death delivered in time-released doses that would put them to sleep and then still their breath forever.

John came first in Sherlock’s hand, keening Sherlock’s name softly, clutching his shoulder and urging him deeper, closer, until Sherlock couldn’t hold back against the clutch of John around him and he, too, let go, releasing an explosive breath into John’s hair and sighing, “John, oh John.”

They didn’t clean up; some part of him, atavistic and ancient, wanted their dried seed to stain the sheets, to mingle with the other evidence of their mortality, to linger until the sheets and the bed and the roof and the floor had sunk into dust and returned to clay.

Still damp with spend and sweat, John reached behind him to grasp the pill cup, shaking one out into Sherlock’s waiting hand and the other into his own.

Both hands were steady as they regarded the engine that would deliver them unto death.

“I regret nothing,” John said, capturing Sherlock’s gaze and holding it as he lifted the pill to his mouth.  As it passed his lips, he added, “I love you, Sherlock Holmes.”

“Goodbye, John,” Sherlock answered, swallowing his own.  Then, as they laid their heads down, twining hands, he whispered, “I love you.”

John’s breath shuddered out, a warm wash against Sherlock’s suddenly chilled cheek, and he tightened his grip on John’s fingers.

“Always,” John slurred, eyes slipping shut.

And on that last word, Sherlock’s eyes closed too.

High over the small white house in the heart of the South Downs, the final skylark sang Earth’s last song and then plummeted unheard forever.

 

 

 


End file.
